Huobi Chain, the blockchain created by the eponymous company, just went open source. The project, in collaboration with Nervos, will enable companies to launch their own blockchain network, tokenize assets or create decentralized financial services (DeFi). The news comes directly from a press release published by PRNewswire, November 12.

Opening Up

In July 2019, Huobi Global, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, teamed up with Nervos to develop a public blockchain focused on decentralized finance (DeFi) and improving the state of global financial inclusion. The Blockchain was dubbed Huobi Chain.

Although the development of this Blockchain is not yet complete, yesterday Huobi Group announced that the project is now open source and available to anyone who wants to build decentralized applications; the code has been made available on Github.

Although Huobi is a cryptocurrency exchange, its strategic vision includes helping uplift those who cannot access the traditional financial system and the choice to make the Huobi Chain open source proves it.

The Architect

The Huobi Chain is being mainly developed by Nervos, a company that has already contributed to several projects including Ethereum, Sparkpool, and imToken. Nervos is focusing its efforts on developing tailored open source components such as Muta, CKB-VM, Overlord, and Nervos-p2p.

These elements will guarantee greater flexibility to developers to create any decentralized application such as lending services, debit services or stablecoins.

Nervos firmly believes in open source ideology and believes that open and public systems are a guarantee for innovation.

Regulator-Friendly Design

The Huobi Chain claims to be the first blockchain that is completely compliant with the law. To achieve this, regulators will have the opportunity to become network nodes and, at the same time, the Huobi Chain will implement decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and identity protocols such as Know Your Customer (KYC) verification to meet Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements.

This choice will certainly facilitate the adoption of permissionless blockchains by classical financial institutions, however, this move could be contradictory as far as financial inclusion is concerned.

According to data from The World Bank, an estimated one billion people around the globe face challenges in proving who they are and hence are excluded from financial opportunities. If the goal of Huobi Chain is to increase global financial inclusion, requesting KYC could be an obstacle.